Living Breakwaters will bring many coastal benefits, but direct flood protection is not among them.

When Superstorm Sandy hit Staten Island at the mouth of New York Harbor, the storm surge rose to 16 feet and 24 people died. Eight years later, the island is inching ahead on raising new seawalls and rebuilding dunes and buying out properties in the zones that can’t be protected.

And launching Living Breakwaters, a pioneering “nature-based” project off the town of Tottenville in the southwestern corner of Staten Island, which is finally out for construction bids.

Living Breakwaters will install a set of eight meticulously designed, partly submerged structures aimed to reduce shoreline erosion and storm waves, help to restock local finfish and shellfish populations, and offer opportunities for community learning about marine ecosystems and social resilience.

The $60 million project originated in the Rebuild by Design competition held by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development after Sandy, said project leader Kate Orff, speaking at a University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science webinar on November 5.

“What’s truly innovative about this project is it aims to be combinatory,” said Orff, founding principal of SCAPE, a landscape architecture and urban design studio in New York. “It combines risk reduction of a physical breakwater with fostering an active shoreline culture, rebuilding the shoreline, and rebuilding the three-dimensional ecological substrate through active oyster restoration.”

What Living Breakwaters won’t do is keep out floodwater.

Instead, they will work in tandem with a dune restoration project, one of whose goals is flood reduction.

“Just stopping flooding is only one of maybe 10 different concepts that we have to think about when we think about purpose,” Orff said. “If one were to build a four-foot linear seawall in this area, with any intense rain event the entire town of Tottenville would get flooded out.”

The breakwaters are configured to bring down the crests of waves coming from the east and southeast, the most common direction in storms. The structures also will minimize shoreline erosion, which is primarily driven by day-to-day waves, and help marine ecosystems recover more quickly after storms.

The design goal is to handle storms with up to 30-inch sea-level rise. “One of the nice things about breakwaters is they don’t stop functioning with sea-level rise,” commented Joseph Marrone, associate vice president and area lead for urban and coastal resiliency at the international engineering firm Arcadis. “They’ll still provide wave reduction and erosion reduction… along with the ecological benefits.”

Built with a mix of hard stone and “bio-enhancing” concrete, the breakwaters will incorporate precast tide pools and other components tailored to provide niche habitats for many marine species. Additionally, “we worked with the Billion Oyster Project and educators on shore to advance the idea of oyster gardening and rebuilding the historic reefs that were once part of this ecosystem,” Orff said.

She sees bringing back such ecosystems as an obligation in resilience projects.

Moreover, it’s critical to test these natural and nature-based measures at scale. “A 20-by-20-foot bed of wetlands won’t have a lot of impact relative to risk reduction, but larger contiguous systems absolutely will,” she said.

“As we are looking more towards natural nature-based features, because we are looking now simultaneously at the climate crisis, sea-level rise, more rainfall, et cetera, we’re also looking at a crisis of biodiversity,” Orff emphasized. “We need to begin to think about all of these things at the same time.”

And to plan more proactively, “because otherwise we’ll get constantly caught in this disaster response framework,” she said.

Resilience roadmaps should stop focusing solely on protecting today’s built shorelines, Orff suggested. Instead, they can reflect how those dynamic coastal environments might benefit from layered solutions “that can keep people safer and can also keep our shorelines living and alive and suitable for marine life,” she said. Among the options, nature-based measures often may be much better suited for the wild complexity of future environments and events.

Orff also calls for a common blue-sky vision in which the almost endless groups of coastal stakeholders all march in the same direction. “When we’re just working at this tiny scale and fighting the small battles, it feels like we’ll never add up to enough to really meet the climate crisis and ecological crisis that we’re facing,” she said.

Great August 2021 snapshot in the New Yorker: Manufacturing Nature.

Images courtesy SCAPE and Arcadis.